More on Taking Notes

By Tim Dunne

In our previous post we introduced some thoughts from Never Be Closing and The Mom Test, about taking notes in a sales meeting.

If you’ve ever tried to decipher your notes after a meeting, you’ll know why this topic is relevant. The face-to-face client meeting is the most important piece of the sales process. Capturing everything you can from that meeting fuels the future of the relationship.

You have to take notes in a meeting so you can mine what you learned in the meeting to build the relationship. It takes a certain skill to conduct a useful conversation, and capture anything useful that surfaces in that conversation.

Our last post gave some key ideas around how to record more information with fewer strokes of the pen (by using Q-notes and symbols), so you can pay attention to your client and not your notebook. Here are some other thoughts on note-taking that we culled from the two books.

Go to meetings in twos. One can take notes, writing as much as necessary, while the other conducts the conversation. The note taker can also be thinking, to make sure important threads in the conversation get followed through.

Capture direct quotes, says The Mom Test. They can be powerful descriptions of your product or service that you wouldn’t think of yourself.

Use emoticons to capture the emotion of the person as he or she said what they said. Angry, excited or blasé; the emotion (or lack of it) with which something is said, is information. How people feel is sometimes more useful than what they say.